PAUL CONVERTED TO THE FAITH OF STEPHEN.

According to his own statement, Paul was the young man called Saul at whose feet, according to a still prevailing custom, the witnesses had laid down. their clothes before the first stones were thrown on the person condemned to death. Paul was a member of the Sanhedrim, as may be assumed from his speech before Agrippa. The man from Cilicia, who had probably heard the disputations with Stephen and his defence, listened also to the dying martyr's confession of faith. Through the confession of that faith the conversion was to be brought about of Saul the Pharisee, of him who had made havoc of that faith which Stephen represented. On his persecuting journey, being near Damascus, with the last words of Stephen still ringing in his ears, impressed by the vision which the martyr had described, Paul had likewise a vision. The Acts relate that suddenly about noon "a light from heaven" shone about him. He fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying unto him: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord ? But the other said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." Already here we can assert that Saul did not in fact persecute Jesus, but the Jews of the faith of Stephen, which was not the faith of Jesus. The voice might have come from the translated Stephen, but it is more probable that it was an echo of Saul's inner consciousness. If so, no personal apparition of the risen Jesus may have been seen by Saul, though he says that as Jesus had been seen

after death by the apostles, and even by five hundred at one time, so also the Lord was "last of all" seen of himself. Saul was convinced that he who spoke to him was none other than Jesus, whom Stephen had called "Lord," and described as the Son of man sitting at the right hand of God.

Unlike himself, the men in his company had not been prepared by Stephen, and the contradictory accounts leave it doubtful whether they saw the light, or only heard the voice, or neither the one nor the other. They stood speechless, but were not blinded, and they took the blinded Saul by the hand, and led him to Damascus, according to directions given to Saul in the vision. Having been blind there during three days, in the house of Judas, a disciple with the name Ananias came unto him, as announced in a vision, in order that "brother Saul" might again receive his sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit. "And straightway there fell from his eyes as it were scales," and he received his sight, arose, and was baptized, and preached in the schools that Jesus is the Son of God, the Christ.

When Paul left Jerusalem for Damascus, his mind must have been powerfully exercised by the recollection of Stephen's teaching in the synagogue, of his mighty speech before the council, and of the dying martyr's last words. The more Paul considered the Scriptural grounds which Stephen had given for his conviction, expressed as it was by irresistible eloquence, the more he was impressed by the fearlessness with which this Jewish dissenter had attacked the Law, and made Israel responsible

for the persecution of the prophets. The more Paul was touched by the love which Stephen expressed towards his enemies by his prayer for them, the more Paul must have felt constrained to admire the man who had been stoned in his presence. The execution had probably taken place at the very "place of skulls," outside what was later called the gate of Stephen, where Jesus had been crucified. It may have been this coincidence which first directed the thoughts of Paul to the importance of the death of Jesus, to whose "murder" Stephen had referred in his speech. Thus the questions may have arisen in the mind of Paul: Was Stephen right in regarding Jesus as the incarnate angel of God? Could Jesus be the angel of the covenant, the bringer of the new and spiritual covenant announced by the prophets? Was Jesus the "righteous one," as Stephen had called him, because the righteous branch," the branch out of the root of Jesse, on whom the Spirit of God would rest, or was he the incarnation of the angel "in" whom is the name" or Spirit of the Lord? Was it for the latter reason that Stephen called him "Lord Jesus"? If so, Jesus was the Angel-Messiah of Essenic tradition, and Paul could not hesitate to be converted to the faith of Stephen, to become a Jewish and Christian dissenter.

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In the perplexing multiplicity of doubts, “accusing or else excusing one another," Paul would raise a fervent prayer for enlightenment, which he knew could only come from above. Suddenly his conviction was formed, that Jesus is the true light, the same angel who had brought to Moses and the

prophets their exceptional spiritual enlightenment, as Stephen had taught. To the inward parts of Paul the "Son" was revealed by "the Father." This divine action on his soul has undoubtedly-we submit-taken place when, on his journey to Damascus, in a trance he was caught up into heaven and heard unspeakable words.

This is the only vision to which Paul in his epistles refers, and we shall try to prove that Paul can have meant no other than the vision near Damascus. It would be inconceivable that Paul in his epistles should not have referred to this vision, and yet to a later one, at a place not mentioned. We submit that the specified time of fourteen years before the date of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians furnishes us with the key to the mystery. Unless, by the most unquestionable proof, the journey of Paul to Damascus can be shown not to have taken place fourteen years before the composition of the epistle, it must be held that the one vision to which Paul refers was that on his persecuting journey fourteen years after which he went to Jerusalem.

The date of Paul's conversion and Stephen's martyrdom has certainly not been finally fixed by chronologists. Our theory is, that these two events, also the beheading of the Apostle James, the imprisonment and probably the liberation of Peter, and, if so, the nomination of " the brother of the Lord" as overseer of the apostles, mark the commencement of Herod Agrippa the First's reign of terror in A.D. 41-42. On this assumption, the three years which Paul spent in Arabia, that is, in the East (Jordan) country, are explained by the three years of Herod's

reign, that is, by the impossibility of Paul's returning to Jerusalem before the death of the tyrant and Jewish zealot in 44-45, whom he had betrayed by his conversion. If that event took place in 41-42, fourteen years later, in 55-56, he wrote to the Corinthians. For the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians-independently of Hitzig's reference of the words "that which restraineth," or he who shuts off, qui claudit, to the Emperor Claudius-can have been written any year before 54, and therefore before the apostolic council. The eighteen months which Paul spent at Corinth, from whence he wrote to the Thessalonians, on that supposition began not later than from 53 to 54, and the two years and six months at Ephesus, from whence he wrote to the Corinthians, can have included the year 56-57, the fourteenth year after his conversion and the year of his second journey to Jerusalem. Six years and three months at Ephesus, Corinth, and Cæsarea would make him leave the latter place at the probable time when Festus took the place of Felix, about 60–61, so that l'aul could arrive in Rome in the spring of 62, and his stay there of two years would give the time after the fire of 64 for his death.

We therefore assume that the vision to which Paul refers in his epistle took place near Damascus. On this occasion, whilst probably in a state of trance, Paul heard only "unspeakable words which no man is permitted to utter," and to which he does not refer. It would be unjustifiable to claim the authority of Paul for the words inserted in the Acts by the composer or the final revisers of this